While language socialization research has yielded rich insights in understanding international students' language learning and socialization experiences in the instructed academic settings (Duff, 2010, 2019; Duff, Zappa-Hollman, & Surtees, 2019), fewer studies have examined the learning and socialization occurred outside the classrooms (Reinhardt, 2019). As Reinhardt and Thorne (2017) pointed out, focusing on the language socialization in the instructed L2 settings might be limited in (1) describing and capturing second language learners' language and literacy practices outside the classrooms, and (2) tracing their complex identity construction and performance across formal and informal, online and offline environments. Therefore, there is a strong need to investigate how their out-of-school language and literacy practices inform/mediate their language learning and socialization in the academic discourses (Kobayashi, Zappa-Hollman, & Duff, 2017).This dissertation set up to portray a comprehensive picture of four Chinese international students' socialization experiences in the U.S. higher education context. Guided by second language socialization framework (Duff, 2010), this ethnographic study traced four Chinese undergraduate students' multilingual and multimodal literacy practices within and outside the First-Year Writing (FYW) class in a U.S. university over an academic year. Data including individual interviews, class observations, social media posts, and written assignments were collected and analyzed using thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006).The findings showed that central to their socialization experiences is my participants' exertion of individual agency to achieve their goals, the construction and negotiation of different identities, and their participation in different communities across various spaces. The study demonstrated that the instructors, their parents, the writing center consultants, the American students, and others they encountered in the informal spaces were all important socialization agents. The interactions with these agents greatly affected how my focal participants positioned themselves and how they negotiated the imposed identities. Their identities then guided their decision-making and socialized participants into different practices, values, and communities. For example, my participants constructed identities as a video editor, an emergent business professional, an intelligent and knowledgeable student, and a bodybuilder in different spaces. More importantly, these identities empowered them to challenge the imposed identity of being the deficient English language learners in academic settings. Therefore, the findings presented that participants were not "passive" novices; instead, they agentively and strategically leveraged linguistic and semiotic resources developed in literacy spaces to navigate academic challenges in the FYW classes and steered their language socialization to positive directions.
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